The Wagner Case (the title is intended to suggest, presumably, the idea of a psychiatric report) was written in May 1888. It is a diatribe against Wagner, in intention a negative polemic. As usual, however, constructive notions lie in close connexion with criticism and, with a little digging, emerge by way of contrast. Out of Wagner's failings emerges the contrasting outline of a positive conception of the artwork and its role in a healthy society, a conception which bears on our concern with Nietzsche's view of the role of religion in such a society.

WAGNER'S FAILINGS

Though the work is ‘contra Wagner’, Nietzsche represents the source of Wagner's failings as lying, to a considerable degree, not in himself but in the audience he finds himself saddled with. So – a point Nietzsche has made many times before – Wagner has to deal with the exhausted, work-weary audience of machine-minded modernity, an audience capable of responding only to cheap thrills, ‘convulsive’ ‘hysterics’, theatrical effects in the worst sense of the word. Wagner, however, makes the audience even more ‘decadent’ by supplying these effects. The effects leave them even more exhausted and demanding of ever ‘stronger spices’. Wagner makes the sick sicker (WC 5).

One of Nietzsche's most frequent accusations against Wagner is that he is an ‘actor’, a man of the theatre. Since that was not, in fact, Wagner's profession, ‘actor’ must here be used in the sense of ‘fake’.